Results for “age of em” 17238 found
Regdata, a new database of the regulatory state
There is a new and very important regulatory database now published and on-line:
RegData: A numerical database on industry-specific regulations for all United States industries and federal regulations, 1997–2012
Omar Al-Ubaydli and Patrick A. McLaughlin
Abstract
We introduce RegData, formerly known as the Industry-specific Regulatory Constraint Database. RegData annually quantifies federal regulations by industry and regulatory agency for all federal regulations from 1997–2012. The quantification of regulations at the industry level for all industries is without precedent. RegData measures regulation for industries at the two, three, and four-digit levels of the North American Industry Classification System. We created this database using text analysis to count binding constraints in the wording of regulations, as codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, and to measure the applicability of regulatory text to different industries. We validate our measures of regulation by examining known episodes of regulatory growth and deregulation, as well as by comparing our measures to an existing, cross-sectional measure of regulation. Researchers can use this database to study the determinants of industry regulations and to study regulations’ effects on a massive array of dependent variables, both across industries and time.
Here is the published piece. Here is a working paper version. Here is the database itself. Here is background and an explanation of different versions of the data base.
The first beauty contest judged by a robot jury
…people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.
The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.
I wonder who will win.
The full story is here, via Michelle Dawson.
What is the anti-austerity recommendation for Brazil?
At 70% of GDP, public debt is worryingly large for a middle-income country and rising fast. Because of high interest rates, the cost of servicing it is a crushing 7% of GDP. The Central Bank cannot easily use monetary policy to fight inflation, currently 10.5%, as higher rates risk destabilising the public finances even more by adding to the interest bill. Brazil therefore has little choice but to raise taxes and cut spending.
Too often, at the popular level, there is a confusion between “austerity is bad” and “the consequences of running out of money are bad.”
Sophisticated analysts of fiscal policy do not make this mistake.
By the way, here is a long study of how Brazilian fiscal policy has been excessively pro-cyclical (pdf).
And how is Brazilian output doing you may wonder?:
By the end of 2016 Brazil’s economy may be 8% smaller than it was in the first quarter of 2014, when it last saw growth; GDP per person could be down by a fifth since its peak in 2010, which is not as bad as the situation in Greece, but not far off. Two ratings agencies have demoted Brazilian debt to junk status. Joaquim Levy, who was appointed as finance minister last January with a mandate to cut the deficit, quit in December. Any country where it is hard to tell the difference between the inflation rate—which has edged into double digits—and the president’s approval rating—currently 12%, having dipped into single figures—has serious problems.
Don’t forget this:
Since the constitution’s enactment, federal outlays have nearly doubled to 18% of GDP; total public spending is over 40%. Some 90% of the federal budget is ring-fenced either by the constitution or by legislation. Constitutionally protected pensions alone now swallow 11.6% of GDP, a higher proportion than in Japan, whose citizens are a great deal older. By 2014 the government was running a primary deficit (ie, before interest payments) of 32.5 billion reais ($13.9 billion) (see chart).
Brazilian commodity prices have fallen 41% since their 2011 peak, so I say Ed Prescott has earned his Nobel Prize right there.
The first underlying article/op-Ed also is from The Economist. Without intending any slight to their other recent issues, the January 2-8 issue is one of their best in a long time. I am very pleased to have bought it in advance at the airport rather than waiting to get to my copy back at home.
Ontario fact of the day
Ontario is the largest sub-national debtor in the entire world, just one alarming distinction. Its debt is more than twice that of California, a state with three times the population and one that has its own severe fiscal problems. Its debt is $294 billion, or over $21,000 per capita. Net debt to GDP is up 48 per cent in the past 10 years to almost 40 per cent, second only to Quebec. Last year’s interest obligations totalled $11.4 billion, about the same as the cost of community and social services. I doubt many Ontarians realize how much they are paying just in interest on the provincial debt. It averages $840 per person every year and rising. Not surprisingly, Standard and Poor’s downgraded Ontario’s bond credit from AA- to A+, citing a very high debt burden and very weak budgetary performance.
Not a major cause for concern in terms of systemic risk, but not good news either.
That is from Joe Oliver, via Felix Salmon.
Are checked bag fees for flights too high, too low, or just right?
Air Genius Gary Leff has a take on this, here is the concluding bit:
While checked bag fees are profitable, airlines want passengers to pay lower fares and higher checked bag fees, not price checked bag fees so high that people don’t pay them. That’s because moving revenue out of fares and into ancillary revenue excludes that revenue from the domestic 7.5% excise tax on tickets.
Checked bag fees are in large measure a tax arbitrage play. Eliminate the tax disparity and — since most aircraft don’t max out their carrying capacity — in ten years I’d bet that checked bags get rebundled back into the fare.
Higher checked bag fees may be disadvantageous since charging more for checked bags pushes more luggage to carry on, causing boarding to take longer, and resulting in aircraft not getting scheduled/utilized as effectively.
Do read the whole thing. Don’t forget — Glazer’s Law!
What was 19th and early 20th century TFP? Which was America’s most inventive decade?
There is a new paper (pdf) on this question by Bakker, Krafts, and Woltjer, here is the abstract:
We present new estimates of TFP growth at the sectoral level and an amount of sectoral contributions to overall productivity growth. We improve on Kendrick (1961) in several ways including expanding the coverage of sectors, extending estimates to 1941, and better accounting for labor quality. The results have important implications including that the pattern of productivity growth was generally ‘yeasty’ rather than ‘mushroomy’, that the 1930s did not experience the fastest TFP growth of the 20th century, and that the role of electricity as a general purpose technology does not explain the ‘yeastiness’ of manufacturing in the 1920s.
They instead suggest that TFP growth is rising throughout the 1920s through the 1960s, a view which I cannot quite agree with. I view the 1960s as a time when previous ideas spread widely, rather than the key years of invention.
My strictly intuitive, historical guess is that TFP growth peaked in the 1890-1930 period, give or take.
More generally, the TFP concept is most useful, and most exact, when TFP growth is low rather than high. The bigger TFP growth might be, the more you have to worry about unmeasured changes in labor quality, and also worry about what is “technical progress embodied in capital goods” as opposed to “sheer accumulation.” When there is less progress, these measurement issues are smaller too.
I am most skeptical of TFP estimates for China, even if you believe the underlying statistics. Compared to “the global frontier,” TFP growth for China has been pretty close to zero, for centuries. Compared to “the frontier within China”…er…Chinese TFP growth and “embodied accumulation of foreign ideas through savings and investment” become pretty much the same thing. The distinction theory was trying to create then has been abolished.
So I’m not convinced by the results of this paper, but they are a useful corrective to excess certainty about Alexander Field and the previous view that the peak of American TFP was the 1930s.
In any case, thumbs up to any paper which uses the word “yeasty.”
The rise and decline of Wikipedia?
Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on this topic (pdf), here is the abstract:
Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
This is an interesting paper, but I think it undervalues the hypothesis that potential contributors simply prefer to be in on things which are both new and cool. Wikipedia, which is no longer new, cannot be so cool. That is why Beethoven’s 5th does not top the pop charts, though if it were new it might.
For the pointer I thank David Siegel.
Wednesday assorted links
Do Juvenile Curfews Increase Crime?
Washington, DC has a juvenile curfew law. Anyone “under the age of 17 cannot remain in or on a street, park or other outdoor public place, in a vehicle or on the premises of any establishment within the District of Columbia during curfew hours.” (There are exemptions for juveniles accompanied by a parent and for travel for jobs (no detours allowed.))
Curfew laws keep some juveniles off the streets during curfew hours but which ones? The criminals seem the least likely to be deterred and with fewer people on the street perhaps the criminals are emboldened.
The DC curfew switches from midnight to 11 pm on Sept 1 of every year. In a working paper, Jennifer L. Doleac and Jillian Carr test the effect of DCs juvenile curfew on gun violence by looking at the number of gunshots heard in the 11pm to midnight “switching hour” just before and just after Sept 1. From a summary:
…the September 1 change provides a clean natural experiment. If curfews reduce gun violence, then when the curfew shifts to 11:00 p.m. rather than midnight, gunfire between 11:00 p.m. and midnight should go down. Does it?
Just the opposite. Using data on gunfire incidents from ShotSpotter (acoustic gunshot sensors that cover the most violent neighborhoods in D.C.), we find that after the curfew switches from midnight to 11:00 p.m., the number of gunshot incidents increases by 150 percent during the 11:00 p.m. hour. This amounts to 7 additional gunfire incidents city-wide per week, during that hour alone. Jane Jacobs was right: the deterrent effect of having lots of people out on the streets is powerful. This makes juvenile curfew policies counter-productive.
The use of ShotSpotter data is innovative and avoids some problems with issues of police enforcement. Calls to 911, however, don’t show the same pattern as the ShotSpotter data which is worrying.
I’d also like to see more information on the proposed mechanism. Is it really the case that significantly fewer people are out on the streets at say 11:30 pm after the curfew has been lowered to 11pm than when the curfew was set at midnight? The curfew only directly affects people under 17 and, as noted above, there are quite a few exemptions. Also what are the ages of those typically arrested on the basis of ShotSpotter alerts?
By the way, on a typical day in DC there are almost 15 gunfire incidents heard by ShotSpotter (data here, the authors report 8 but that may be from a restricted sample). A lot of gunfire is heard around a handful of schools. The ShotSpotter system is quite accurate. Although it misses some shots it distinguishes shots from car backfires better than people do. I also found this note from the Washington Post amusing in a frightening way:
About a third of detected gunshot incidents in the city happen on New Year’s Eve or around July 4. Officials explain the high rate as celebratory gunfire.
NinjaEconomics on Tinder (from the comments)
I’m not convinced women who are on Tinder who say “no hookups” actually mean that.
First of all, Tinder is for young people and young women don’t have a hard time meeting men in real life. So, for someone to go to a place that is known to be where casual sex seekers meet and announce THEY aren’t at all interested in casual sex seems fishy. If I’m not in the market to buy shag carpeting that’s full of vomit and fleas, I don’t go shopping at the used carpet store that specializes in shag carpeting that’s full of vomit and fleas. I certainly don’t go there and ask where I can find silk hand-knotted rugs from Central Persia for basically the same price and get offended when I’m offered vomit and fleas.
More likely, these women are interested in hooking up (or at least open to some opportunities of it happening) but don’t want their friends and colleagues knowing this should someone come across their profile, so like the Playboy readers who buy the magazine for the articles, these women are on Tinder “just for the lulz.”
Which brings me to my second point: Despite their loud claims, women are not on Tinder to find their husbands. Getting married is easy. It is so easy that almost anyone can do it! Very unattractive, very poor, mentally unstable people can do it. Now, you might not be able to marry someone who meets all the required characteristics but if Tinder women were sincere in husband-hunting, rather than just stating “no hookups”, which is spectacularly unhelpful, they’d actually list their requirements in order to speed up the process.
And, if the internet (and online dating in particular) is so hostile to women, why would any reasonable woman who has above-average chances of meeting someone in traditional ways subject herself to unbearable and avoidable sexual harassment online? If she’ll assume the risk of verbal abuse from potential suitors, she must be very motivated to meet someone using this platform and I doubt she will be in the top 5-10% of all available women (or perhaps she’s more resilient and online interactions are not emotionally harmful to her). So compared to the top 5-10% of the men she’s vying for (attractive, educated, marriage-minded men in their 20s are quite rare), she won’t have the upper hand, so making brusque dismissals right out of the gate just seems more like an attempt to demonstrate dominance. The point is, the women who really don’t want to hook up aren’t on Tinder and the ones who do say that on Tinder aren’t being honest.
That is from NinjaEconomics, the original post is here.
Arrived in my pile
Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts.
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter; both Robin and Bryan are fond of this one.
Steven Klepper, Experimental Capitalism: The Nanoeconomics of American High-Tech Industries.
Caroline Freund, assisted by Sarah Oliver. Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms.
Clement Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle Over Economic Inequality.
Rick Shenkman, Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics.
The Top Ten MR Posts of 2015
Here are the top ten MR posts from 2015, mostly as measured by page views. The number one viewed post was:
- Apple Should Buy a University. People really like to talk about Apple and this post was picked up all over the web, most notably at Reddit where it received over 2500 comments.
Next most highly viewed were my post(s) on the California water shortage.
2. The Economics of California’s Water Shortage followed closely 4) by The Misallocation of Water.
3. Our guest blogger Ramez Naam earned the number 3 spot with his excellent post on Crispr, Genetically Engineering Humans Isn’t So Scary.
5. My post explaining why Martin Shkreli was able to jack up the price of Daraprim and how this argued in favor of drug reciprocity was timely and got attention: Daraprim Generic Drug Regulation and Pharmaceutical Price-Jacking
6. What was Gary Becker’s Biggest Mistake? generated lots of views and discussion.
7. Tyler’s post Bully for Ben Carson provided plenty of fodder for argument.
8. The Effect of Police Body Cameras–they work and should be mandatory.
9. Do workers benefit when laws require that employers provide them with benefits? I discussed the economics in The Happy Meal Fallacy.
10. Finally, Tyler discussed What Economic Theories are Especially Misunderstood.
Posts on immigration tend to get the most comments. The Case for Getting Rid of Borders generated over 700 comments here and over 1700 comments and 57 thousand likes at The Atlantic where the longer article appeared.
Other highly viewed posts included two questions, Is it Worse if foreigners kill us? from Tyler and Should we Care if the Human Race Goes Extinct? from myself.
The Ferguson Kleptocracy and Tyler’s posts, Greece and Syriza lost the public relations battle and a Simple Primer for Understanding China’s downturn (see also Tyler’s excellent video on this topic) were also highly viewed.
I would also point to Tyler’s best of lists as worthy of review including Best Fiction of 2015, Best Non-Fiction of 2015 and Best Movies of 2015. You can also see Tyler’s book recommendations from previous years here.
What caught my attention in 2015
This was the year when it became clear that much of Eastern Europe probably won’t end up as free societies. It’s not just semi-fascism in Hungary. Poland and Slovakia, arguably the two most successful economies and societies in Eastern Europe, took big steps backward toward illiberal governance. How can one be optimistic about the Balkans? I imagine a future where African and North African refugees are bottled up there, and Balkan politics becomes slowly worse. As for Ukraine, a mix of Russia and an “own goal” has made the place ungovernable. Where is the bright spot in this part of the world?
Nothing good happened in China’s economy, although more fingers have been inserted into more dikes. I am not hopeful on the cyclical side, though longer term I remain optimistic, due to their investments in human capital and the growing importance of scale.
I have grown accustomed to the idea that Asian mega-cities represent the future of the world — have you?
Syria won’t recover.
This was the year of the rise of Ted Cruz.
It was an awful year for movies, decent but unpredictable for books. The idea that Facebook and social media rob the rest of our culture of its centrality, or its ability to find traction, is the default status quo. Not even that idea has gained much traction. Cable TV started to receive its financial comeuppance. Yet on the aesthetic side, television is at an all-time peak, with lots of experimentation and independent content provision, all for the better. I suspect this is one reason why movies are worse, namely brain drain, but I am hoping for longer-run elasticities of adjustment into the broader talent pool.
Against all odds, Homeland was excellent in its fifth season.
I became even more afraid to move my cursor around a web page, and in terms of content, more MSM sites became worse than better. Banning photos would solve twenty percent of this problem.
Stephen Curry and Magnus Carlsen were the two (public) individuals I thought about the most and followed the most closely. Each has a unique talent which no one had come close to before. For Curry it is three point shooting at great range and with little warning; for Carlsen it is a deep understanding of the endgame as the true tactical phase of chess, and how to use the middlegame as prep to get there. It wasn’t long ago Curry’s weapons were “trick” shots, perhaps suitable for the Harlem Globetrotters; similarly, players such as Aronian thought Carlsen’s “grind ’em down” style could not succeed at a top five level. Everyone was wrong.
But here’s what I am wondering. Standard theory claims that with a thicker market, the #2 talents, or for that matter the #5s, will move ever closer to the #1s. That is not what we are seeing in basketball or chess. So what feature of the problem is the standard model missing? And how general is this phenomenon of a truly special #1 who breaks some of the old rules? Does Mark Zuckerberg count too?
I realized Western China is the best part of the world to visit right now. The food trends where I live were Filipino and Yemeni, which I found welcome. Virginia now has a Uighur restaurant in Crystal City, and the aging San Antonio Spurs continue to defy all expectations. Kobe Bryant, who “ranks among the league’s top 5 percent of shot-takers and its bottom 5 percent of shot-makers,” has redefined the retirement announcement, among other things.
Top curling teams say they won’t use high-tech brooms. Just wait.
How much does assortative mating matter for income inequality?
The astute Kurt Mitman noted that Greenwood, et.al. issued a later corrective (pdf) to their earlier 2014 AER piece (ungated here), and therefore their estimates in that piece (which I very recently cited) contain no real information. I apologize for having cited the piece, as I was not aware of the later correction.
It would be incorrect to conclude, however, that assortative mating has no connection to income inequality. Some of the other evidence for that connection is cited in my piece, but more specifically Greenwood et. al. have since revised their own revision (pdf), and produced a more integrated model. A gated version of this piece was just published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics this last week.
In the integrated model, the focus is on family and labor supply decisions more generally. For instance, let’s say a couple keeps its income up by not divorcing: is that “no divorce” or rather “assortative mating” which is contributing to income inequality? After all, high income, high education, well-paired couples do divorce a lot less, so that may be a semantic distinction from a causal point of view. The authors suggest that their integrated family model explains about a third of the rise in income inequality from 1960-2005 (see for instance p.46, with a summary of their overall approach and results starting on p.47), and assortative mating is very much a part of their bigger-picture story.
Monday assorted links
1. “…the only guilded butler in North America…” “In Canada, graduating butlers fresh from school can expect annual wages in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, climbing to $75,000 within five years. After 10 years, according to Mr. MacPherson, butlers can look forward to six-figure salaries.” Finally: ““If you think you love people, but you’re not sure you love people, it’s not the profession for you.””
2. WTF?
3. A good review of Carol. And Valentina’s in Austin is an A+, get the brisket taco, smoked corn, and beans.
4. What makes an academic paper useful for health care policy?
5. Sidney Mintz has passed away. Ellsworth Kelly and Meadowlark Lemon, too. The latter two are NYT links.
6. Seymour Hersh’s speculative piece on Syria, Turkey, Russia, etc. Not a pretty picture.